How Work Is Rebounding (or Not) Globally

The International Labor Organization put out a mammoth report Monday on employment around the world. Want to know about part-time work in Germany? The minimum wage in Bangladesh? The middle class in Burkina Faso? It is all in there. The study paints a picture of a world still struggling to create jobs in the wake of the global recession, with developing economies enjoying stronger growth and a better jobs picture than developed economies â€" especially those in Europe. Here are eight main takeaways.

1. The global employment rate of 55.7 percent is still nearly a percentage point lower than it was before the crisis. The world needs about 31 million jobs to make up the gap.
2. Globally, there are about 200 million â€" 200 million â€" unemployed people.
3. For developing economies, employment rates will return to their precrisis levels around 2015. For advanced economies, it will take until after 2017. Employment rates are higher now than they were before the crisis in 13 out of 28 developing economies that the I.L.O. examined. That is true for only six out of 37 advanced economies. And the United States is not one of them. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are currently about 135.5 million Americans employed, down from about 138 million at the beginning of 2008. The employment rate â€" specifically, the employment-to-population ratio â€" has dropped from about 63 percent when the crisis hit to 59 percent today.
4. For some countries, the crisis never ended. In Cyprus, Greece, Portugal and Spain, the overall employment rate has fallen more than three percentage points in the past two years alone.
5. For developed countries, a better job market has often gone hand in hand with worse jobs. More people are being hired, but those jobs are often part time, low paying or temporary. That is true in Germany, Israel and Luxembourg. It is, however, not true for the United States. The country has fewer jobs, but those jobs are, on balance, of higher quality, the I.L.O. found.
6. Long-term unemployment is a global scourge. It increased in more than half of surveyed countries, and labor forces have shrunk in more than half of surveyed countries, in part because so many workers have simply given up on looking for a job. In the United States, the falling unemployment rate is in part due to hundreds of thousands of workers’ leaving the labor force.
7. The bad economy is giving rise to social unrest in many regions of the globe, especially Europe. Economic growth and the unemployment rate are the two strongest determinants of unrest, the I.L.O. said. Unsurprisingly, Europe, which has struggled to recover from the recession, has had the biggest spike in unrest. Latin America, East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa â€" all growing decently well â€" have experienced declines in the I.L.O. measure of unrest.
8. The American middle class is shrinking. And it has been for three decades. The share of adults living in middle-income households has fallen to 51 percent in 2010 from 61 percent in 1970.